Motivational Quotes

Criticism

I'd rather be hissed at for a good verse, than applauded for a bad one.

- Hugo, Victor

Best Quotes about Criticism

The easiest thing a human being can do is to criticize another human being.

Little, Lynn M.

People want you to be a crazy, out-of-control teen brat. They want you miserable, just like them. They don't want heroes; what they want is to see you fall.

DiCaprio, Leonardo

The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labor in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.

Raphael, Frederic

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

Meir, Golda

It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's mature critics often are.

Walker, Alice

Praise those of your critics for whom nothing is up to standard.

Hammarskjold, Dag

Critics are already made.

Byron, Lord

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.

Paglia, Camille

10.

Abuse if you slight it, will gradually die away; but if you show yourself irritated, you will be thought to have deserved it.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

11.

Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you're two steps ahead!

Flagg, Fannie

12.

No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.

Harold Rosenberg

13.

In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

Sontag, Susan

14.

The rule in carving holds good as to criticism; never cut with a knife what you can cut with a spoon.

Buxton, Charles

15.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

Conrad, Joseph

16.

Unlike other people, our reviewers are powerful because they believe in nothing.

Clurman, Harold

17.

Most of our censure of others is only oblique praise of self, uttered to show the wisdom and superiority of the speaker. It has all the invidiousness of self-praise, and all the ill-desert of falsehood.

Edwards, Tryon

18.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right. You'll be criticized anyway.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

19.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

20.

All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.

Turner, Ted

21.

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

Man, Paul De

22.

Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.

Proverb, Chinese

24.

To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.

James, Henry

25.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.

Wilde, Oscar

27.

All the world's a stage, and all the clergymen critics.

Nunn, Gregory

28.

Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.

Hutton, R. H.

29.

Professional critics are incapable of distinguishing and appreciating either diamonds in the rough or gold in bars. They are traders, and in literature know only the coins that are current. Their critical lab has scales and weights, but neither crucible or touchstone.

Joubert, Joseph

30.

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense. He whom nature has made weak, and idleness keeps ignorant, may yet support his vanity by the name of a critic.

Johnson, Samuel

31.

Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.

Miller, Henry

32.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Murdoch, Iris

33.

They condemn what they do not understand.

Cicero, Marcus T.

34.

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.

Ziglar, Zig

35.

As much as we thirst for approval we dread condemnation.

Selye, Hans

36.

A louse in the locks of literature.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred

37.

It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation of the automatic.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Franklin, Benjamin

39.

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.

Burroughs, William S.

40.

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic.

Lehman, David

41.

Criticism comes easier than craftsmanship.

Zeuxis

42.

He cannot be strict in judging, who does not wish others to be strict judges of himself.

Cicero, Marcus T.

43.

When subjected to the rain of criticism, let?s not curse the rain. Let?s accept it as a part of life. Let?s remember that the more criticism we can successfully handle, the more zest we will experience in our lives.

Sinha, Shall

44.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge

Hill, Napoleon

45.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

46.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.

Auden, W. H.

47.

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?

Slater, Christian

49.

Critical remarks are only made by people who love you.

Mayor, Federico

50.

One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

W. H. Auden